His Chemical Romance

[Spoiler Alert]  Denzel Washington is a fine actor who makes smart film choices.  That’s why we were excited to see his latest movie, Flight.  In the months leading up to tonight’s premiere, we saw harrowing footage of a heroic landing of a commercial airline flight.  With Robert Zemeckis at the helm, we were prepared for an emotional thriller, Denzel’s emerging as a Sully-like hero who saved the lives of his passengers—“souls,” as the flight crew referred to them. 

Flight is anything but a thriller—despite the fact that I found myself biting my nails for the duration.  It is a cautionary tale of a man who can’t be honest with himself, whose arrogance and recklessness lead him on a path to self destruction.  Its suspense comes from our love of the star, if not his character.  We fear he will not do the right thing or learn from his mistakes.  We brace for the worst.   It is not a toe-tapper.

This film could have been about any professional who works in a high performance, high responsibility job.  The fact that I travel frequently and spent a good ten years of my life traveling constantly for business made it all the more poignant.  There was a particular trip to New Orleans back in the mid-90s when a 767 on which I was traveling lost one of its two engines mid-flight.  We made an emergency “crash landing” in Jackson, Mississippi, at an airport that was too small to accommodate wide-body jets.   Fortunately, everything else in the plane was operable and we landed successfully, albeit hard, thanks to an experienced pilot and a lot of foam on the runway.  I remember the fear of facing death, clutching a photo of my young children in my hand and fixing my eyes on them even as I “assumed the position.”  It was an experience I hope never to relive.  This movie took me back a little too close for comfort.

On another level, the film takes a peek at the human relationship with death.  In one of its most interesting scenes, the injured Denzel limps out of his hospital room, desperate for a cigarette.  He finds a safe haven in the stairwell, only he is not alone.  He meets a young drug addict, and a terminally ill cancer patient.  Together they take account of their respective damages—one being hurled toward death by disease, another by heroin overdose, and Denzel seemingly by accident.  Their responses are sharply contrasted:  acceptance, resilience, and denial.  Throughout the film are random murmurings about G-d’s will.  Are we to accept a dire fate because it is G-d’s will?

But what if our fate is man-made?  As the National Transportation Safety Board holds its hearings, we become painfully aware of how much of our life is left in the hands of others.  It is a complex world.  We take for granted that the cars we drive are expertly crafted, or that our processed foods are safe to eat.  How many aspects of a routine airplane flight are subject to human error, negligence, or incompetence?  Corporations are known to cut corners to squeeze out larger profit margins, testing the limits of established maintenance guidelines.  And then there is the presumed integrity of the uniformed crew that greets us as we board the flight.  Travel is a blind product.  We teach our kids not to get in a car with strangers, yet we put ourselves in the hands of those we do not know and fasten our seatbelts for take-off.  This is the real definition of faith.

With Denzel Washington in the driver’s seat, I found myself wondering whether his character would somehow rise above his failings and be allowed to rest on the laurels of his heroism.  It was repeated again and again, no one else could have landed that plane.  I wondered how far Hollywood would twist this modern day moral tale.  Would we forgive his human failings and find understanding in his back story?  Could he clean up his act in the eleventh hour and skate through the investigative process, learning his lesson once and for all?  Would the investigation in the aftermath of the crash be as negligent as the process that contributed to it?

Flight is an excellent film with sensitive portrayals of broken characters.  It is not formulaic, but it manages to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.  There are no cheap shots or easy answers.  This is not a comfortable film to watch, but it is immensely satisfying because it insists that everyone get what they deserve.